Preparing for a disaster is often not as simple as it seems. When you’re thinking about how to protect your business against potential disasters, you need to take into account all the different possible threats and make sure that your plan will be able to handle them all.
IT Asset Management (ITAM) plays an important role in business continuity planning (BCP) as it provides key information that enables organizations to measure their BCP readiness. Data from your IT assets can be used to create contingency plans for all types of disasters.
In addition to the BCP, it’s important to have a disaster recovery plan (DRP) that can be activated in the event of a disaster or outage. A DRP should include all the steps necessary to get your business back up and running after a disaster has occurred—whether that’s recovering from a natural disaster like an earthquake or hurricane, or recovering from a manmade disaster like an attack on your network.
Virima IT asset management helps with BCP and DRP
As a business owner, you know how important your data is. You know how critical it is to keep your systems running smoothly and securely. And you understand that downtime can cost you thousands of dollars per hour—no matter whether it’s a planned outage or an unexpected disaster.
But what do you do when disaster strikes? How do you know your systems will be up and running again in time? What if they’re not?
With Virima’s IT asset management platform, we can help you create a plan that will give your business the best chance of surviving any disruption—from a simple power outage to a massive natural disaster—while also keeping costs down and improving efficiency.
Virima empowers your businesses to make informed decisions about your IT infrastructure by providing you with a powerful IT asset management tool that enables you to:
- Understand what you own – including all hardware assets (computers), software licenses (including Microsoft Office) as well as any third-party services such as cloud storage providers
- Identify potential issues before they happen – allowing companies to proactively identify potential risks associated with using outdated software versions or hardware components/devices that are no longer supported by manufacturers
Virima provides the right type of inventory and asset data that organizations need in order to be prepared for real-life disasters with the right level of detail, speed and accuracy.
Virima’s solutions include:
- A comprehensive database of all your physical assets, including serial numbers, locations and other metadata.
- An integrated software solution for managing IT assets across various departments such as IT Infrastructure Management (ITIM), Asset Management and Software License Management (SLM).
Read: How to prevent data breaches with Virima Discovery
Business continuity planning with Virima
The recent pandemic has brought attention to the need for business continuity planning. All organizations should be developing a plan to ensure they can continue to operate after a disaster, but most are not.
What you may not realize is that there’s more than one way to go about developing a disaster recovery plan. One option is to create a business continuity plan, which will guide the processes, roles, tools, backups, and recovery following a disaster like this one. The resulting BCP must be based on a strategy where the components revolve around how business processes and IT assets work together to enable the continuous operation of the organization.
A holistic view of your organization and processes
A common mistake that companies make when they’re planning for continuity is not taking a holistic view of the company’s systems and processes. This is important because it involves looking at your organization as a whole and making sure that you have insight into what makes it tick.
The first step in planning for business continuity is to understand your workforce, including their roles and responsibilities as they relate to business processes, IT assets, and systems. You also need to be aware of any dependencies on third parties or suppliers.
This phase will also help you understand how employees are currently accessing your systems and applications. Are they using mobile devices? If so, what kind of security are you currently employing on those devices? Do employees access sensitive information through email or other forms of communication? What kind of encryption is being used? These are just a few examples. There are many more questions that need answers before you can implement an effective continuity plan.
Classifying mission-critical and non-critical processes
The next step in developing a business continuity plan is to understand what it means to be mission-critical and non-critical.
Mission-critical processes are those that are necessary for the company to operate on a daily basis, such as payroll or order fulfillment. Non-critical processes are those that are not essential to day-to-day operations but are necessary for the long-term success of the company, such as marketing campaigns or employee training.
Once you’ve identified which processes are critical and which ones aren’t, you can determine whether they need to be backed up in case of a disaster. If they don’t have any impact on your ability to continue running your business without them, then you may not need to bother with backup and recovery plans for them.
ITAM is key to BCP
ITAM plays an important role in business continuity planning (BCP) as it provides key information that enables organizations to measure their BCP readiness.
ITAM is a key component of BCP because it provides the right type of inventory data that organizations need in order to be prepared for real-life disasters with the right level of detail, speed and accuracy.
Data from your IT assets can be used to create contingency plans for all types of disasters.
It’s important to create contingency plans for all types of disasters. It’s also important to ensure that you have the right technology in place to protect your data and help you recover from a disaster. Data from your IT assets can be used to create contingency plans for all types of disasters, but only if you know what type of information is available from each asset, as well as how far back in time it goes.
If you have critical data spread across multiple systems and locations, then it’s essential to have good visibility into what systems are running where so that you can protect them effectively.
You’ll know exactly what system you need to protect before disaster strikes with Virima
Business continuity is one of the most important aspects of IT planning, as it can help you avoid costly outages and keep your business running smoothly. If you’re looking for an effective way to create your own ITAM solution, we would love to hear from you!
Virima can help with this by providing a single dashboard for all of your IT assets and applications. This gives an overall view of what’s running in the cloud or on-premises. It also shows which applications use which databases, so if one goes down then you’ll know which other services will be affected.
Virima ITAM ensures end-to-end management of all data center, edge, cloud, stockroom, software and non-IT assets.
Our dynamic IT asset management platform featuring automated Discovery ensures that you know exactly what you’re licensing, and where each license is being used. We also provide a variety of tools to help you track license entitlements against the actual number of software installs with device-level and ownership details.
Control costs by installing the Windows Discovery Agent for software license metering to identify underutilized software wherever the PC roams.
Your organization’s IT landscape is a complex and constantly evolving network, making it crucial to have a system in place that can keep up with the changes.
Virima’s efficient IT asset management tool helps you make informed decisions regarding IT asset purchases, evaluate deployment decisions, and maintain organizational structure.
Virima’s intelligent reporting engine enables the generation of KPI dashboards and metrics that are critical to the management of your IT portfolio landscape—allowing you to proactively address IT security and compliance risks and have the evidence to prove it.
There’s more to Virima ITAM than meets the eye! Schedule a demo to know more.
